CAIRO -- For a people who want to be loved as much as Americans do, these are trying times. People around the world see our troubles in Iraq and say we had it coming. They hear us talk about Arab democracy and think we're trying to steal their oil. Some even take a kind of perverse satisfaction in seeing us battered by monster hurricanes.

Other great nations throughout history have done a better job of being disliked. The British during their days of empire treated the rest of the world with a cool imperial disdain. The French under Charles de Gaulle regarded haughtiness as a national virtue. The Russians were brutally indifferent, the Chinese politely so. All these powers in their moments of greatness treated the rest of the world as quasi-barbarians. If they were hated in return, so what?

Indifference is not an American trait. Part of our Benjamin Franklin heritage of industry and self-improvement is that we want to be admired, applauded -- and, yes, loved. When we discover that we are in fact deeply unpopular in many parts of the world, we think we must have a communications problem. So the call goes out for Karen Hughes and the public diplomacy specialists.

I've had a lesson in our unpopularity in Egypt, where I've been hearing anti-American broadsides from activists who should be thanking the Bush administration for its pro-democracy stance. These are people who, but for the administration's pressure over the past few years on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, might well be in prison. But do they appreciate President Bush's help? Not on your life.

Take the pro-democracy speech in June by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She told an audience at the American University in Cairo that the administration was breaking with a 60-year-old policy that "pursued stability at the expense of democracy" and choosing instead to support democratic activists even when they challenged pro-U.S. rulers such as Mubarak. But the Egyptians remained dubious, to put it mildly.

"The United States doesn't want freedom for Arab people," insisted Ali Abdel Fatah, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. When I asked him about Rice's speech, he said America wanted democracy only as an "artistic decoration," because truly free elections would threaten Israeli and American interests. A similar sentiment was expressed by Amin Soliman Eskander, a co-founder of the pro-democracy group Kifaya. "I don't find U.S. policies credible," he said when I asked him about Rice's speech. As for American help, he said no thanks. "If the U.S. supported Kifaya, we would lose credibility on the Egyptian street."

Another leading democracy activist, Hisham Kassem, said he warned the secretary of state when she was in Egypt not to expect any bouquets. "I told Rice your administration is the most unpopular ever in the Arab world and will remain so until Bush leaves office." He thinks that this anti-Americanism is unfair and that Arab historians will eventually realize the importance of Bush's pro-democracy policies. But not anytime soon.

The Bush administration might do better in this part of the world if it accepted its unpopularity, rather than trying to wish it otherwise. That's especially true in Iraq. Most Iraqis were profoundly grateful that the United States toppled Saddam Hussein in April 2003, but that doesn't mean they like being occupied. The antibodies against the American presence are just too strong. The average Iraqi experiences U.S. occupation as a daily humiliation.

The potency of this anti-Americanism means, among other things, that we can't solve our problems in Iraq by sending in more troops. A bigger U.S. footprint would only increase Iraqi anger and fuel the insurgency. In contrast, fewer American troops may actually make it easier to stabilize the country, if the United States can help the Iraqis create a strong military and government of their own. America may be having trouble defeating Abu Musab Zarqawi, but the Iraqis won't. The moment they forge a real national government that draws together Sunnis and Shiites, Zarqawi is a dead man.

Realists are always quoting Machiavelli's admonition that it is better to be feared than loved, but that advice never seems to resonate very well with American presidents. They want to be feared and loved. Perhaps under our system, politicians become addicted to love. But in a world where we are the only superpower, the reality is that we will be unpopular. Nobody is going to root for Goliath -- even a nice, democratic Goliath.

An uncharitable world expects America to act in its own interests, and so we should. We promote democracy and anti-terrorism not because these are universal ideals, but because they serve America's need for a more stable world. We will never convince the rest of the world that we aren't acting selfishly, no matter what we say.

While I don't know if it would work or not, I find his suggestion that less troops might mean less hostility interesting. Mostly because it takes into consideration aspects of Middle Eastern and also Muslim culture that Americans never seem to.

We saw another example of this with the Abu Ghraib scandal. Bush gave a nationally televised speech saying it was the US's plan to tear down Abu Ghraib in a symbolic gesture of apology/making it right. Many Americans thought that was a good suggesstion. When they interviewed most Iraqis about it...most said they didn't care. "Why tear down a perfectly good building? It was the people in it who we had the problems with!"

America puts more stock into symbolic gestures...Iraqis, who lived for years with their leader torturing people and imprisoning people, couldn't understand our zeal to tear down a perfectly good building when they knew from experience that torture and imprisonment just moves to a new location.

When we didn't stop the looters it wasn't because we only wanted to pillage oil...it was specifically because we didn't want our troops to be viewed as occupiers. The troops were ORDERED not to stop people with any kind of force...to stand down and not be seen as policing the activities. The Iraqis saw us doing nothing and took it to mean we didn't care about them...

Further back, we saw this culture clash cause problem during the first Gulf War. Bush did not go into Baghdad at the order of the UN and because, frankly, he didn't want to lose the positive poll numbers. The US thought, "Hey...we got Iraq out of Kuwait and trounced the Iraqis whenever we found them. Who cares about Saddam he was beaten bad...we won!!!" Unfortunately, the culture in that part of the world is quite different. Saddam and the people thought, "We fought the most powerful military might on the planet and WE WON. They turned and went home without every reaching our capital city!!!"

The arrogance that the military "victory" gave Saddam was one of the reasons why we continued to have problems with him over the following years.

We ran into exactly the same type of cultural misunderstanding when we were fighting al Sadr and his men. Every time we would beat them to the point of giving up they would run into a mosque. We wouldn't blow up a mosque because we didn't want to upset the Iraqi people anymore than we already had...because of the Geneva convention...because of how we knew the media would portray it across the world...THEY viewed it as a victory...once again they won. And when al Sadr asked for a ceasefire only to break it only to ask for it again...and we met with him...it just cemented the vison of al Sadr as a powerful leader who commanded the attention of the US militray...rather than what he should have been seen as...a power-hungry mini-dictator wannabe who should not have been given the power and respect we gave him.

One of my major complaints about how this war has been fought is that it truly seems like we have absolutely no one involved in the planning process who actually knows anything about Middle Eastern culture. We have made mistakes that may not have seemed like big things...but actually represent major culture-clash...and have certainly been one of the driving forces behind our difficulties in Iraq.

While I'm not sure if removing troops would work at this point...I'd be willing to consider it as an option because this author is doing exactly what I think we should have been doing all along...looking to Iraqi culture before we do something decidedly American.

That was a very well-written response Gem. I agree with you that we seem to have no one in the planning (or execution stage) of our operations in Iraq that has a fundamental understanding of ME culture. In some sense (heh,William Joyce will have a field day with this) we really should have heeded advice from various Israelis who offered some very pointed criticism of the manner of our operations from the first day after saddam's regime fell.

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